Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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Howard Roark laughed.
He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable. The stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dramatic than motion. The stone glowed wet and sunrays.
The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.
His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together, the curve of his neck and the weight of his blood in his hands. He felt the wind behind him, in the hollow of his spine. The wind waved his hair against the sky. His hair was neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind.
He laughed at the thing that had happened to him that morning, and at the thing which now lay ahead.
He knew that the days ahead would be difficult. There were questions to be faced and a plan of action to be prepared. He knew that he should think about it. He knew also that he would not think, because everything was clear to him already, because the plan had been set long ago, and because he wanted to laugh.
He tried to consider it. But he forgot. He was looking at the granite.
He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him. His face was like a law of nature – a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheek bones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be spilt and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore on the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.
These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite, and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.
Then he shook his head, because he remembered that morning and that there were many things to be done. He stepped to the edge, raised his arms and dived down into the sky below.
But even the unknown past is present in us, it’s silence as persistent as a ringing in the ears. When I stand in the road that passes through Port William, I am standing on the strata of my history that goes down through the known past to the unknown: the blacktop rests on state gravel, which rests on county gravel, which rests on the creek rock and cinders laid down by the town when it was mostly beyond the reach of the county; and under the creek rock and cinders is the dirt track of the town’s beginning, the buffalo trace that was the way we came. You work your way down, or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present, until finally you come to the beginning in which all things, the world of the light itself, at a word welled up into being out of their absence. And nothing is here that we are beyond the reach of merely because we do not know about it. It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with remainders of Itself.
When my grandfather was dying, I was not thinking about the past. My grandfather was still a man I knew, but as he subsided day by day he was ceasing to be the man I had known. I was experiencing consequently for the first time that transformation in which the living, by dying, pass into the living, and I was full of grieve and love and wonder.
And so when I came out of my house one morning after breakfast and found Braymer Hardy sitting in his pickup truck in front of my barn, I wasn’t expecting any news. Braymer was an old friend of my fathers; he was curious to see what Flora and I would do with the long abandoned Hartford Place that we had bought and were fixing up, and sometime he visited. His way was not to go to the door and knock. He just drove in and stopped his old truck at the barn and sat looking around until somebody showed up.
“Well you ain’t much of a Catlett,” he said, in perfect good humor. “Marce Catlett would have been out and gone two hours ago.”
“I do my chores before breakfast,” I said, embraced by the lack of evidence. My grandfather Catlett would, in fact, have been out and gone two hours ago.
“But,” Braymer said in an explanatory tone, as if talking to himself, “I reckon your daddy is a late sleeper, being as he is an office man. But that Wheeler was always a shotgun once he got out,” he went on, clearly implying, and still in excellent humor, that the family line had reached its nadir in me. “But maybe you’re a right smart occupied of a night, I don’t know.” He raked a large cud of tobacco out of his cheek with his forefinger and spat.
But even the unknown past is present in us, it’s silence as persistent as a ringing in the ears
Danny’s mother, Kate Helen Branch, had been in love of Burley Coulter’s life. They were careless lovers, those two, and Danny came as a surprise – albeit a far greater surprise to Burley than to Kate Helen. Danny was born to his mother’s name, a certified branch of the Branches, and he grew up in the care of his mother and his mother’s mother in a small tin-roofed, paper-sided house on an abandoned corner of Thad Spellman’s farm, not far from town or even closer, by a shortcut up through the woods, to the Coulter Place. As a sole child in that womanly household, Danny was more than amply mothered. And he did not go fatherless for Burley was that household’s faithful visitor, its pillar and provider. He took a hand in Danny’s upbringing from the start, although, since the boy was nominally a Branch, Danny always knew his father as “Uncle Burley.”
If Danny became a more domestic man than his father, that is because he loved the frugal, ample household run by his mother and grandmother and later by his mother and himself. He loved his mother’s ability to pinch and mend and make things last. He was secretly proud of her small stitches in the patches of his clothes. They kept a big garden and a small flock of hens. They kept a pig in the pen to eat scraps and make meat, and they kept a Jersey cow that picked a living in the green months out of Thad Spellman’s thickery pasture. The necessary corn for the pig and chickens and the corn and hay for the cow were provided by Burley and soon enough by Burley and Danny.
If Danny became a better farmer than his father that is because, through Burley, he came under the influence of Burley’s brother, Jarrat, and of Jarrat’s son, Nathan, and of Burley’s and Nathan’s friend, Mat Feltner, all of whom were farmers by calling and by devotion. From them he learned the ways that people lived by their soil and their care of it, by the bounty of crops and animals, and by the power of horses and mules.
But if Danny became more of a man of the woods and the streams than nearly anybody else of his place and time, that was because of Burley himself. For Burley was by calling and by devotion a man of the woods and streams. When duty did not keep him in the fields, he would be hunting or fishing or roaming about in search of herbs or wild fruit, or merely roaming about to see what he could see; and from the time Danny was old enough to go along, Burley took him. He taught him to be quiet and watch and not complain, to hunt, to trap, to fish and swim. He taught him the names of the trees and of all the wild plants of the woods. Danny’s first providing of his own to his mother’s household were of wild goods: fish and game, nuts and berrys that grew by no human effort, but furnished themselves to him in response only to his growing intimacy with the countryside. Such providings pleased him and made him proud. Soon he augmented it with wages and produce from the farmwork that he did with Burley and the others.
Danny’s mother, Kate Helen Branch, had been in love of Burley Coulter’s life
The river bore them calmly on, through the plateau, into the Pre-cambrian mantle of the earth, toward the lowlands, the delta and the Sea of Cortez, seven hundred miles away.
“Soap Crick Rapids next,” Smith said. And sure enough, they heard again the tumult of river and stone in conflict. Around the next bend.
“This is ridiculous,” Abbzug said privately to Doc. They sat hunched hard together with a wet poncho spread over their laps and legs. She was beaming with pleasure. Water dripped from the brim of her exaggerated hat. The doctor’s stogie burned bravely in the damp.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “How do you like our boatmen?”
“Weird; the tall one looks like Ichabod Ignatz, the short one looks like a bandit out of some old Mack Sennett movie.
“Or Charon and Cerberus,” Doc said. “But try not to laugh; our lives rest in their uncertain hands.” And they laughed again.
All together now they plunged into another maelstrom, Grade 4 on the river runner’s chart. More gnashing river, heaving waves, the clash of elementals, the pure and brainless fury of tons of irresistible water crashing down upon tons of immovable limestone. They felt the shock, they heard the roar, saw foam and spray and rainbows floating on the mist as they rode through chaos into the clear. The adrenaline of adventure, without the time for dread, buoyed them high on the waves.
This was the 45th trip down the Grand for Smith, and so far as he could measure, its pleasure was not staled by repetition. But then no two river trips were ever quite alike. The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle, within the firm reality of mother earth. River, rock, sun, blood, hunger, wings, joy – this is the real, Smith would have said, if he wanted to. If he felt like it. All the rest is androgynous theosophy. All the rest is transcendental transvestite transactional scientology or whatever the fad of the day, the vogue of the week. As Doc would have said, if Smith would have asked him. As the hawk. Ask the hungry lion lunging at the starving doe. They know.
Thus reasoneth Smith. Only a small businessman to be sure. Never went to college.
In the grand stillness between rapids, which was half the river and most of the time, Smith and Hayduke rested on their oars and let the song of the canyon wren – a clear glissando of semiquavers – mingle with a drop of water droplets, the gurgle of eddies, the honk of herons, the rustle of lizards in the dust on the shore. Between rapids, not silence but music. While the canyon walls rose slowly higher, 1000, 1500, 2000 feet, the river descending, and the shadows grew longer and the sun shy.
A chill from the depths crept over them.
“Time to make camp, folks,” Smith announced, sculling for shore. Hayduke pitched in. Close ahead, on the right bank, lay a slope of sand, fringed by thickets of coppery willow and stands of tamarick with lavender plumes nodding in the breeze. Again they heard the call of a canyon wren, a little bird with a big mouth. But musical, musical. And the far-off roar of still another rapids, the sound like the continuous applause of an immense and tireless multitude. The grunts and breath of two men laboring, oars scrapping. The quiet talk of the first class passengers.
“Dig the scene, Doc.”
“No technical jargon, please. This is a holy place.”
“Yeah, but where is the Coke machine?”
“Please, I am meditating.”
He listened politely, though not very attentively, while his father took his turn, describing a feeling of worry that he’d had that day at work: a concern about one of the newchildren that wasn’t doing well. Jonas’ father’s title was Nurturer. He and the other nurturers were responsible for the physical and emotional needs of every newchild during its earliest life. It was a very important job, Jonas knew, but it wasn’t one that interested him much.
“What gender is it?” Lily asked.
“Male,” Father said. “He’s a sweet little male with a lovely disposition. But he isn’t growing as fast as he should, and he doesn’t sleep soundly. We have him in the extra case section for supplementary nurturing, but the committee’s beginning to talk about releasing him.”
“Oh, no,” Mother murmured sympathetically. “I know how sad that must make you feel.”
Jonas and Lily both nodded sympathetically as well. Releasing a newchild was always sad, because they hadn’t had a chance to enjoy life with the community yet. And they hadn’t done anything wrong.
There were only two occasions of release that were not punishment. Release of the elderly, which was a time of celebration for a life well and fully lived; and releasing of a newchild, which always brought a sense of what-could-we-have-done. That was especially troubling for the Nurturers, like Father, who felt like they had failed somehow. But it happened very rarely.
“Well,” Father said, “I’m going to keep trying. I may ask the committee for permission to bring him here at night, if you don’t mind. You know what the night crew Nurturers are like. I think this guy needs something extra.”
“Of course,” Mother said, and Jonas and Lily nodded. They had heard Father explain about the night crew before. It was a lesser job, night-crew nurturing, assigned to those who lacked the interest or skills or insight for the more vital jobs of the daytime hours. Most of the people on the night crew had not even been given spouses because they lacked, somehow, the essential capacity to connect to others which was required for the creation of a family unit.
“Maybe we could even keep him,” Lily suggested sweetly, trying to look innocent. The look was fake, Jonas knew; they all knew.
“Lily,” Mother reminder her, smiling, “you know the rules.”
Two children – one male, one female – to each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules.
Lily giggled. “Well,” she said, “I thought maybe just this once.”
